I've noticed that many of the voices in the republic who loudly demanded in the run up to the last referendum that Scotland vote to leave the Union they'd been part of for three centuries, for an unnatural land border to be created, and for the island of Britain to be partitioned; are the exact same voices that have about turned and are now just as loudly demanding the UK remain in the European Union they've been part of for only four decades.

In 2014 they were banging on about how Scotland was an independent country and very much looking back to a rosy cliche of Scotland as a one dimensional shortbread tin place, invoking Culloden and the past in a very positive and nationalistic way. Yet now we are told by the same people that anyone who supports leave is a racist little Englander looking back to a rosy place that can no longer exist in the 21C.

Many of them are using the refugee crisis to get cheap digs in against our neighbour, posting diatribes, memes, and pictures of right wing English loons, instead of doing summat more positive and productive like demanding the refugees come here to safety in the Republic of Ireland, where there's twelve times less people than in Britain, and lots more room for them.

The same pseudo-political luvvies who were banging on about how unfair the un-elected Commission, and what they were then calling a dictatorship of Europe, was to Ireland after the economic crash of 2008, are now suddenly big fans of the EU; getting their rocks off using the upcoming referendum to indulge in one of their favourite cultural sports. Brit bashing.

This inconsistency and reversal of position from advocating for breakaway independent nation states to European federalism, has led me to wonder: could it be that what is really driving these loud anti-English voices to get involved in the sovereign decisions of the neighbouring isle when posting all their scaremongering pictures and memes, is not a genuinely helpful desire and consistent political position, nor giving two hoots about what is best for the people of Europe, Britain or Scotland; but a lingering age old latent cultural enmity toward the English common in some of the over 40s here. Inculcated into society and culture over three generations by Eamon de Valera and his gang of religious nutbags.

Who, let's not forget, before the great hero murdered by his own people, Michael Collins, had even returned to Dublin with the best deal for independence he and the team that Dev handpicked to parlay with the most able of the British empire, could negotiate - decided, without even having met Collins off the boat and read the proposal, solely through his jealously of the younger man, to bring about the sin and stain of the Irish civil war. All over a form of words he swore he would 'wade through rivers of Irishmen's blood' rather than utter.

Then, ten years later, after his destructive antics had left him sidelined from public life, the great dictator Dev u-turned, went into parliamentary politics, swore an oath to the King that he previously instigated the civil war over; and proceeded to sell out every single ideal of the republic's founding Proclamation once in power.

With absolutely no input from the Brits, Dev set about reducing the status of Irish women to little more than the property of their husbands, using the bully pulpit of church and state to name, shame, surveil, brainwash, and control through fear the Irish people; imprisoned all his former comrades in arms who disagreed with him, banned from publication in Ireland all her greatest writers, created the state slave and sex abuse factories into which were tossed anyone transgressing the sickeningly hypocritical morals of the ultra-dysfunctional Church; making Ireland a laughing stock, and treating the country as his own private fiefdom.

Spending the rest of his life making sure there was total silence about the crimes of the civil war, state and church, and deflecting all the silent unexpressed hatred for the contemporary crimes of church and state he was responsible for creating, onto the English, by playing the role of whinging victim and concentrating the focus of the national mind onto the historical injustices the English had visited upon Ireland, with the mantra of eight hundred years, eight hundred years.

I have not seen one post from the 'eight hundred years' crowd using the refugee crisis to bash the Brits, calling for the Republic of Ireland to take in refugees. Plenty of posts demonsing the English and using refugees as the excuse to do so, but nothing by way of concrete proposals, or even calls, to welcome refugees over here. Not one.

Why?

Don't they want refugees here?

The numbers of asylum seekers and conditions these poor frightened people escaping terror in their homelands are more or less jailed in when they arrive in the republic, certainly suggest that we the citizens of the republic should look at our own cultural faults and flaws first, before finding easy and cheap ways to creatively engage in playing the victim of the British empire at every opportunity and slagging off the auld (English) enemy.

OK, we all get the eight hundred years bit, but none of us alive now in the republic younger than ninety-five ever lived under British rule. And this aside, what did they ever do for us anyway? Apart from give us our infrastructure, law, English language and Anglophile culture?

'Eight hundred years, eight hundred years.' You don't hear the French and Germans dwelling on and moaning about far worse, and far more recent historical injustices. So, do us a favour, moaning Brit bashers; get over yourselves, and start practicing what you claim to preach in your whinging anti-English diatribes. Please. Thanks very much.

Against the backdrop of eternity
choking victims celebrate the season
forget it, forget it, forget
hello Dan.....23 hours have passed
an irritating man pressing buttons
I think Bukowski would hate me
of course we dance in threes
the crushing faces anonymous
Briana's breath
who has a kite in her chart
to have the sex of good tidings
for the looney movie later
betray your bed with bounces
the stick, the notch, the fire-

As to what constitutes the most profound, durable form of
human progress— certainly, most educated people would place emphasis, if asked,
on the higher disciplines: science, philosophy, high art, and architecture. The
kind of work which constitutes the most profound, durable form of progress in
these disciplines has, as a constituent element, what I call the weight of
centuries effect. What I call the weight of centuries effect is self-evident in
the work— an attempt to assimilate into the work, the influence and gravitas of
all that has been accomplished in the respective discipline before, going back
not just decades but centuries. If this is what constitutes human progress, it
needs to be acknowledged that a huge chunk of modern human society is the
avowed enemy of human progress. The modern press corps, for example— who
express their avowed stance as enemies of human progress by running away,
screaming, from any high discipline work with the weight of centuries effect
inhering. The press subsist, essentially, to produce what I call a “wall of
horseshit” effect (conversely), and the wall of frivolous, ephemeral horseshit
is there to lead the populace, often subconsciously, to the realization that
there is not nor ever can be any profound human progress, no weight of
centuries. The darker side of the human race and the human continuum demand
that the entire surface of human life, in fact, be a wall of horseshit, and all
profound progress hidden. As I’ve begun to understand architecture, and the
architectural dimension of human life from Philadelphia, one of the great architectural
masterwork cities of the world, and a city whose high sector affiliations tower
over other American metropolis/suburb areas, I put PFS/Neo-Romanticism and our
achievements resolutely on the architectural side of things.

In fact, architecture is useful in establishing a
demarcative line between weight of centuries material in the high disciplines
and everything else. Being on the side of the demarcative line we are on, it
behooves us to be realistic about what we can expect. PFS has, in-built, some
Hollywood-level sex appeal to offer; the photos attest to it; leading some to
wonder why the media will not cover us. The reason is simple: as the avowed enemies
of human progress, the press note the architectural bias of our work— the
weight of centuries effect— and run screaming in the other direction. If the
press are to erect the wall of horseshit they need to erect for themselves,
with the specific intention of outright denial of weight of centuries/human
progress, everything associated with architecture has to be an anathema, our sex
appeal be damned. Party politics can be like this on the surface, too— not the
weight of centuries, the weight of pure, totalized evanescence. So, these are
the wages of an architectural bias for the PhillyFreeSchool; weight of
centuries signifies that we will have to be ploughed over in favor of
evanescent trash on the surface by the enemies of human progress. The weight of
centuries demarcative line is very stringent about this. On the other hand, we
have the peace of mind of knowing that no one can accuse us of selling out, or
selling cheap. It also needs to be noted that the wall of horseshit approach to
the surface of human life is not going anywhere; is, in fact, intransigently
built into human history.

One of the reasons that a movement like Neo-Romanticism must
grow incrementally— the opposition will always try to rig things so that it can
never generate any real momentum. Neither the press corps, nor the party
politicians want momentum to develop behind any work with the weight of
centuries insignia inscribed onto it, which is the insignia of genuine human
progress. Momentum, invariably, is for evanescent trash, some of which can
stand as a simulacrum of weight of centuries work, but never the real thing
(and, as is sinister, both the press corps and the party politicians do know
the difference). As per the opposition: are they people, you might ask, or are
they amoebas? One thinks swiftly of Swift, and is grateful for some of his
literary incisions. Who cares? The right buildings, including here on Fayette Street in
Conshohocken, exude their own kind of sentience among the perceptive sectors of
the human race, impose their own standards and ethos and make their own
demands. Architecture, as a secret powerhouse in human society, may have its
emergence in some sectors facilitated by PFS. However much momentum may be
allowed to accumulate, all of it will be directed towards getting a wider
audience to note weight of centuries level work, and not the simulacrum of
same. Keats, Bach, and Rubens rather than Shakespeare, Mozart, and Rembrandt—
the first tier being ranked first, right on the surface. I will not attempt to
conceal that Neo-Romanticism maintains an avenging angel attitude towards the
enemies of human progress, and weight of centuries. Whenever we can afford to
fuck the bad guys over, and push the architectural up, we will do so; let
momentum fall where it may.

Imagine a man. He dips a finger into the filthy Schuylkill & comes up Adonis. Or, a Manayunk side
street finds him staring Acteon-like at some omnipotent Diana, teeth gleaming
in the crepuscular atmosphere.

Imagine a man. He is the heart & soul of the soulful,
beer-soaked bar, reveling in quips his wits are too fast for, taking in bitter,
ham-fisted stories of love lost, found & regained. This is a man who can
listen.

Jeremy. Imagine a Jeremy. This man for whom art is like air,
for whom humanity is beyond cruelty & joking, for whom the savor of the
gold-speckled past is equaled only by future nights staring at diaphanously
gowned girls.

Imagine Jeremy with a camera. This is a kind of sex for him,
a kind of yoga, a yoking of the creative imagination to the fact of our flesh,
that may sag, or glisten, or sag and glisten, or, having sagged, suddenly
glisten under the camera’s eye.

Imagine pictures. They are limned with the light of
soul-baring honesty, the rawest form of candor, the privileged position of an
unprivileged spectator—that is, a sensitive spectator sans imposing ego. These
are pictures of people, unmediated by art.

Only it is art. The artifice is all in the angles—how a
smile reveals a desire to be fondled, how a pose means such-and-such knows
everything there is to know about Siouxsie & the Banshees, or the Cure, or
the Fixx.

Get a fix here. A fix of real human beings being real in
real pictures taken by a real man at the height of his “seeing” power; a fix of
sensuality for people with brains, who can unite the signifier, in all its’
nuanced glory, with the signified.

There is no disjuncture here between sign and meaning. These
people speak for themselves, just by being naked, or half-naked, or a bit
naked. It is the dialect of desire that powers streetcars & other vehicles.

Let this show be a vehicle for you. When it’s over, you will
find yourself sodden with the musty soak of the filthy Schuylkill.
You will have seen Diana, without having to become a stag; the pictures will “stag”
you, right where you come. Home.